First Sunday of Lent: Angel, Animal and Balance

We are all aware of being sinners, but perhaps only in some conventional sense. We can admit that maybe we are not as loving as we can be or that we are crabby in the morning. The truth is, by most standards, we are probably pretty good people, or at least people trying to be pretty good. If we look at sin like that, we trivialize the problem of human sin. Sin is more than our consistent ability to screw things up. Sin, a word that comes from the Germanic origins of English, zunde. Zunde is also the root of our English word, ‘asunder’ as to ‘rip asunder.’ Sin is our experience of disconnection from God, others and very self. Sin is our innate distrust of God or any center of the universe that is not me. Here is an example.

To be afraid of God
You saw the most recent mass murder in Florida. This epidemic of school shooting seems endless. The sinfulness of it is so complicated it baffles how to address the hatred of our young people for other teens and children. Some say we need better mental illness responses. Always a good thing. We need to ban all military style weapons; politically a difficult, perhaps, impossible given the increasing anger and divisiveness of our culture. What to do?
 
People are rightly concerned about security here. We are sponsoring a workshop lead by the OVPD on March 10 for all concerned and our volunteers. But if someone should come in to the sanctuary and begin killing us, what are you afraid of? That you or your loved one might go to heaven? What has been ripped asunder in our fear-filled world is our trusting relationship with God. It is easy to trust, even take God for granted when everything is going our way. When the course of our life turns in another direction, our distrust, just below the surface, begins to bubble up. What we see is our fear and distrust of God and death. In short, SIN.
 
Angels and Animals
In the gospel, Jesus, in a short, pithy story, goes into the wilderness where he is “among the beasts” and ministered to by angels. This biblical image of the incarnation of God, Jesus of Nazareth, suspended between the angels and the animals, is an image of the human person. We all recognize that we have animal instincts for breeding, feeding and community. Like the animals are life can be hard. Still, we try to understand the world in a way well beyond the mind of an animal. We explore physics, biochemistry, poetry, music and art. These human capacities for understanding lead us into understanding God’s creation, reflecting on its significance and responding to God in a uniquely human way.
 
We are hybrids: Spiritual and Material
Every human being is a hybrid of a spiritual nature, like an angel, and an animal nature. We combine matter and spirit. Angels are immaterial and animals are purely material; we are a hybrid and we preside over the reconciliation of the material and the spiritual. The temptations of Christ are signs of the disconnection between soul and body, the sundering of the spiritual and the physical in the human. We oscillate between the two extremes: angelism and bestiality. Angelism is to try and live as if the body were unimportant. That gives us an irrational fear of sex leading to Puritanism and, the Catholic version, Jansenism.  Bestiality leads us to deny our spiritual nature and seek to satisfy our desires by feeding our appetites, as in our modern predicament. Both angelism and bestiality leads to a shipwreck for human beings. We need to reconcile the spiritual and the physical in our life.

Balance and Christ 
Jesus, the God man, is the balance we seek. Lent is a time to seek balance in our life through prayer, fasting and almsgiving and the practice of the works of mercy. Prayer helps to build trust in the generosity of God. Fasting disciplines our animal appetites. Almsgiving is an acknowledgement that we are not at the center of creation.
 
 One idea about doing something different that might make a difference in Lent is to participate in our Called & Gifted Retreat on Saturday morning, beginning with the 8 am mass and ending at noon. Lent ought to be a time of reflection and self-assessment and the Called & Gifted retreat is a good step in a new and promising direction. You can sign up on our parish website.